We’ve been a totally remote workforce across three countries since late 2014 and with that I’m often asked “how do you maintain a good culture?”. We have grown from having 4 staff in a Brisbane office, to 20 staff living across three countries, and top staff tenures ranging from 8 years, to at least 5 x 5 year veterans.
Sure, we have simple things like staff expense accounts so everyone can manage little costs that compound over time when working from home. Food delivered if you’re too chained to the desk, buying new stationery to pep yourself up or essential oils to calm the home office, but there’s more important topics to focus on than treats.
For what it’s worth, here’s 3 of my keyfocusses to maintain an exceptional culture in a business, especially one that is all or mostly decentralised in its staffing.
Have leaders who can lead, not simply great technicians with staff.
Results from our 5th Employee Satisfaction Survey paint a very positive picture about what life can be like if you get the right blend of challenge, opportunity and support in your agency. Just some of the encouraging figures are in the images below, but for me, one stands out.
“Someone at work cares about my wellbeing”
It’s one I’m most proud of and all sorts of positive staff and client experiences come from the 100% agreement to that statement.
With little barrier to entry these days when starting a media agency, let alone a digital media agency, very often skilled technicians find themselves needing to recruit and therefore having a handful of people around them they now need to nurture, develop and support.
In some instances, a bloke who was great at SEO ends up running an agency of 50 staff. It’s near impossible to maintain a caring environment when leadership is unstructured and underskilled.
Leadership takes diligent focus and emotional intelligence to navigate. Leaders should have access to coaches (from time to time), leadership content, positive examples and definitely decision making context. CEO openness to leaders following them is a must.
And a leader not being led is probably a pretty scary scenario too.
Know who you suit
In addition to empathetic leaders, recruiting with thoroughness and moving people on with honesty is one of the secrets to success we’ve learned over the last 10 years of growth. Though we’re never perfect, I’m reasonably confident that even people who have left Pivotus for bigger opportunities or those that we have had to let go, will still have a positive story to tell of the agency and our people. Maybe we should run that survey one day?
We believe that our remote working culture is a major contributor to our success as an agency. Our team members are able to work from the comfort of their own homes or travel destinations, resulting in a better work-life balance, increased productivity, and ultimately, job satisfaction. This allows us to attract and retain great talent from anywhere that suits our timezones.
Over the last 2 years, we have worked with a retained recruitment firm to manage our incoming talent needs. They took the time to know all of the idiosyncrasies of our business and only spoke with people who suited them, rather than focussing on LinkedIn keyword bingo and the resulting DM spam…. And we all know what a Seek ad alone brings in the door…
But remote working full time certainly doesn’t suit everyone.
We’ve narrowed down our target market for success to applicants who have these characteristics:
- A need to work remotely, rather than a desire to.
Now this tends to be summarised by people with young children or pets, but it can also include those training for highly demanding sporting activities or those studying at a high level. People who need to optimise their time, suit remote work.
- Mature and experienced.
One of the great flaws in the remote model is that it is extremely difficult (to the point of putting off trying) to support Grads,Interns and Juniors. Sure there can be a million video calls and great onboarding videos, but as you may have experienced yourself, the best learning often comes from the osmosis in a physical office and bumping into opportunities and conversations. But it’s not an age thing. Some of the most experienced people can be highly irresponsible and unsuitable!
- Introverted as a baseline personality.
Though we have a dedicated Social Events Committee and a whole company trip to Boracay coming up in a few months (!!), most of the work when remote is by yourself and without much external stimuli. If you gain energy from being around people, remote isn’t for you for the long term. And if you’re an introvert you’ll also love the fact there isn’t friday arvo drinks and you can simply start your weekend early 😉
- Autonomous and self driven.
Micro managers don’t survive in remote environments and nor do those that need them. As a boss you have to get comfortable with the fact that your team might be spending plenty of time on Netflix or even some side hustle. But if they’re delivering on your expectations and when you turn up the productivity requirements for a short period, they continue to deliver, then there’s really no reason to waste emotional energy on wondering. In my experience, when you have the team humming along, your role as a leader will be to make sure they’re not working too much, rather than too little.
And a quick word on Clients. There’s a fair chance your business will suit clients who fit the above criteria as well. If they’re Sir Lunch-a-Lot or Ms MicroManager, you’re going to frustrate each other and they’re better suited elsewhere. Look for those that are focussed on deliverables and service levels more so than facetime and fun.
Diligently work against the Founder’s personality
This can be a tough one to admit but in a startup, until there is a level of quality middle management, the culture will be a pretty spot-on reflection of the founder. Good and Bad. The old double edged sword!
As a business development and relationship oriented person with undiagnosed tendencies to overly procrastinate when it comes to admin and following processes, growing a business can be fast and furious and fun until you overpromise and underdeliver that one time too many. Mature and competent staff also don’t like cleaning up a boss’ mess for a living, so soon get over it too.
To help with this we have built:
- Robust campaign management software that is highly customised to our ways of working
- Limited communication channels, to focus conversations and task delegation
- Client facing project management systems in Asana to keep focus on tasks, deliverables and updates.
- Live BI dashboards that technical and account management staff can feed commentary into, while visualising data in a meaningful, customised way.
- Dedicated support role to the founder to ensure all of the elements they are responsible for, but don’t enjoy, actually do end up getting done….
Same works in reverse for the highly technical founder who has limited ability to present the business to staff and clients in an engaging way. But we don’t have experience in that situation.
As per the quote on my wall from Kurt Fearnly AO, Paralympian and Sport Australia NED, “Every board needs a variety of lived experiences to enable it to make the best decisions”. Although we’re certainly lacking in some areas of diversity at Pivotus, diversity of personality and then implementing systems and processes that scaffold the ‘weaknesses’ of each personality, are indeed a strength.
